he Diary of Anne Frank is a record depicting how the author, a Jewish girl, struggled in adolescence when hiding from the Nazis in Holland during the Second World War. Rather than portraying people’s sufferings amid the cruel battlefields, Anne turns to victims’ s real lives which seemed to be normal but has been wrecked beyond imagining.

Having escaped from the hand of the Nazis, Anne hid together with seven other people in the “Secret Annex” at Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam. Two years later, they were caught and deported to concentration camps. Anne’s father, the only survivor, later publicized his daughter’s diary found in the attic where she had spent the last years of her life. Since then, the remarkable diary has become a world classic— a powerful reminder of horrors of war and an innocent witness of civilian lives in the turmoil.

The book begins with the thirteen-year-old Anne receiving a notebook as a birthday present. She names it Kitty and takes it as a real friend to whom she can confined secrets buried deep in her heart, because “paper is more patient than man.” Anne stays true to this friend, and with such honesty she brings life to the diary.

The early days in hiding see Anne being a sensitive girl trying hard to adapt to a new life completely isolated from the outside world. Life in concealed rooms challenges family relations by intensifying conflicts between members.

The everlasting disputes with her mother upset Anne.

“I felt sorry for Mummy; very, very sorry, because I had seen for the first time in my life that she minds my coldness…but this is something I can’t apologize for because I spoke the truth and Mummy will have to know it sooner or later any way.” Frustration comes not only from an unfulfilled expectation of a good mother but also a failure to have Anne’s own voice, especially in the family tension caused by their living condition.

Captivity also diminishes privacy and community life, which Anne desperately longs for.

“But most of all, I long for a home of our own, to be able to move freely and to have some help with my work again at last, in other words—school.”

Life in hiding interrupts Anne’s communication with her peers and deprives a teenager of many educational experiences, which magnifies all her uneasiness and confusion about her coming of age, including family conflicts, self-awareness and positioning, and even love and sex.

However, changes take place in the later part of the diary. Anne still finds it hard to get along with her mother, but she figures out where the problem lies, “It is suddenly clear to me what she lacks. Mummy herself has told us that she looked upon us more as her friends than her daughters. That is all very fine, but a friend can’t take a mother’s place.”

It is lucky to have a friend-like mother, but to manage daily trifles in hiding and in wartime requires more responsibilities for a qualified mother, not simply a friend. Such a realization from the daughter, which may further influence the mother, promises future progress for both.

Anne still longs for freedom and hates the endless war, but comparing horrible news from the outside world with her privileged condition, she has the epiphany that, “Happiness in your own heart can only be veiled, and it will still bring you happiness again, as long as you live, as long as you can look fearlessly into the heavens, as long as you know that you are pure within, and that you will still find happiness.” She learns to be grateful for what she has.

The gratitude further extends to those who selflessly help her family when they are in hide. As she states in her diary in the wake of Elli, one of their helpers, falling ill,

“Those friends—they put on the brightest possible faces, bring flowers and presents for birthdays and bank holidays, are always ready to help and do all they can. That is something we must never forget; although others may show heroism in the war or against the Germans, our helpers display heroism in their cheerfulness and affection.”

Her concerns for Elli and reflection on all she received turn into admiration for the heroic help offered by their loyal friends in difficult times.

During this period, Anne shows not only her growth but also the ultimate shining nobility of human spirit as one of the many people in hide. Despite the horror and the humiliation of their daily lives, most people never give up. From the perspective of an adolescent, while war changes the way of growth, her growth never stops.

Sustained by her warmth and her wit, Anne wrote and thought in her diary much of the time about the things that every sensitive and talented adolescent would write—her relations with parents, her developing self-awareness, and all the problems of growing up.

Anne is not only a recorder of life but a war correspondent. Such portraits in turn offer a unique angle of reflecting on the war—the tension it brings to an ordinary family, the fear and horror it can cause to a teenager’s growth. What is more, her diary further stands as a first-hand witness of something more immortal about the war—the bravery and strong will which readers can see from this diary a “monument to the spirits of those who have worked and are still working for peace” (Eleanor Roosevelt), and which should never be overwhelmed in the tides of history.

This is one of the featured articles by SES Writing Workshop. The author is an undergraduate student of the School of English Studies, Shanghai International Studies University (SISU). 

The supervisor, Curtis Evans, is a foreign expert and international research fellow at SISU. The supervisor, Li Mei, is a lecturer of English at SISU.